The Fourteenth's Heir
by Hane no Zaia
Summary: HIATUS. AU. Brought into the Noah Family at a young age, Allen Walker inherits the position as the Fourteenth but also finds himself possibly the only successor to "the Earl" and has to deal with all that it entails, including the inherited grudges against his predecessor.
1. Genesis

_Disclaimer: I do not own DGM. Obviously._

**- o0o -**

**Genesis**

**- o0o -**

_Silver-grey eyes snapped open, staring out into the darkness._

_Honed instincts flared up, sensing the danger, and he sat up, throwing a stray glance at the alarm clock by his bedside._

_02:42._

_He grabbed his clothes and put them on before liberating an already loaded Walther PPK from beneath his pillow along with a few rounds of ammunition, seeing that he would rather be armed than sorry the moment the shit hit the fan._

_He stilled, listening._

_Tick tick._

_His blood ran cold at the sound, but he forced himself to remain calm as he put the safety back on the gun before putting it away. Picking up his backpack, he slung it over his shoulder, cursing his lack of bulletproof vests as he made his way up to the curtain-covered window. Reaching it, he carefully peeked through the slight gap between the curtains, looking for the telltale sign of assassins. However, luckily for him, the idiots responsible for the explosive device left outside his apartment door seemed quite certain that their bomb would finish him off and that there was no need for a sniper. On the other hand, there was always the possibility of them lying in wait…_

_He shook his head slightly to clear his thoughts before pulling up his hood. Waiting around really wouldn't do him much good anyway, considering that there was a bomb nearby waiting to go off, so he calmly reached up to pull the curtains aside before reaching up to open the window._

_Tick tick tock._

_He was already in the air by the time the explosives went off._

**- o0o -**

In one way or the other, he had always been living on the edge.

In one way or the other, he had always found himself in various life-threatening scenarios varying degrees of severity.

Then again, that was the life of a budding mafia operative.

People did say that most criminals started out young and he most certainly did, although not by his own choice. He had been little different from your average stray, ferocious in his struggles to get free and hissing at the man who'd caught him and brought him to the Noah's Ark, an underground nightclub which doubled as the Headquarters of the Noah Family. He hadn't wanted to go there; Hell, it had been the last place on Earth he'd wanted to be in, but the man had paid little heed to his protests and, once the man had finally gotten tired of listening to them, had proceeded to put him out using chloroform.

Upon regaining consciousness, he had found himself abroad, locked inside a sparsely decorated room in some old mansion, staring out through the barred windows at the widespread grounds below and beyond that a forest and a town which was unknown to him.

The first day he had done what most soon-to-be twelve-year-old children would, he had stayed in bed surrounded by a protective huddle of blankets, trying his best to keep from shaking; trying to keep from breaking down, as he had known such a reaction would not help his situation in the slightest. Besides, it hadn't been like anyone would be looking for him either, not with Mana gone, and it wasn't like his guardian Cross Marian would have taken note of his disappearance either as the man obviously hadn't given a damn about him to begin with.

At such a realisation, silver-grey eyes had overflowed with shameful tears and he had hidden beneath the sheets and multiple blankets stacked on top of them, pulling them closer to him, trying to muffle the sounds of him crying.

He had stayed that way for a while although he couldn't tell exactly for how long, but the puffiness of his eyes had already receded when there had been a knock on the door, soon followed by the sound of it being unlocked. He had pulled the blankets even tighter around himself then, forcing his eyes shut as he had willed his body to stop shivering so bloody pathetically; he had wanted to get away from there; he had wanted to pretend it had all been just some nightmare, some sick twisted figment of his imagination, something which wasn't real and something he would snap out of, awaken from, opening his eyes to Mana's smiling face and burying his head in his foster-father's shoulder while the man would try to soothe him, telling him it was all just a bad dream and that he was safe and that nothing bad would happen, even if bad things happened anyway and he wasn't safe and Mana was really dead and…

The mattress had shifted from the weight as somebody sat down on one side of it. A hand had nudged his shoulder, but he hadn't reacted; he hadn't acknowledged the other person as if he had hoped that the other person would simply go away if he did just that. As was quite obvious however, his attempt had been doomed to failure from the very start as the other person had merely heaved a sigh before grabbing hold of one of the blankets, starting the process of forcefully unravelling him from the protective cocoon he had sought to isolate himself from reality with. He had fought against it, of course, but what little strength remained in his already weakened child limbs had been nothing in comparison to that of a grown man.

Before he had really known what had occurred, he had found himself liberated from most of the blankets and pulled into a somewhat awkward embrace as the man had whispered soothingly to him in some language he didn't understand, but he had still felt oddly calmed by it and had ceased his struggles to get free in favour of collapsing against the other's frame due to sheer exhaustion.

It had been the feeling of somebody stroking his white locks away from his forehead that had brought him back into wakefulness the second time around and he had opened his eyes to the stranger from earlier – the strangely familiar stranger – who had once again been sitting at his bedside. Long tresses of curly black hair pulled into a simple ponytail along with a pair of oddly-coloured eyes had greeted him. The eyes had been the colour of amber, reminding him of a cat or an owl, and they had been a great contrast to the man's tanned complexion and facial structure that both indicated that the man was likely a Southern-European, maybe a Spaniard or something to the like. "Are you okay now, _anjo_?" the man had asked, retracting his hand.

He had frowned lightly at the unknown word, something which the man somehow found amusing. "It's Portuguese for _angel_, Allen," the man had said, snickering at the boy's somewhat startled reaction at the mention of his name. "So, are you?"

Allen Walker had looked questioningly at him, silently contemplating whether the man was an enemy or not, while he had also tried to recall why the man – whom he was sure he'd never met before – had seemed so oddly familiar to him the first time he had laid eyes on him.

A cracked frame displaying an old photograph had flashed before his mind's eye for a moment and his eyes had widened in shock for a moment before he scrambled madly to get to the other side of the bed – away from the stranger – who wasn't having any of it as he had simply grabbed a hold of his arm and hauled him back, pulling him into his lap and staring down at him with a both surprised and amused look in his eyes. Those strange amber-coloured and nearly gleaming eyes…

"Uncle Neah?" Allen had breathed out before he was able to stop himself, watching as the other's eyes widened comically at the mention of a dead man's name.

"No," the man had finally said. "Tyki Mikk."

**- o0o -**

The Tyki that Allen had met on that day wasn't very much like the one Allen came to meet on a more frequent basis, the infamous hitman known for his multiple ways of killing people as well as for the fact that he took great pleasure in putting people to death in an as creative way as possible. Hell, nowadays Allen was fairly sure that the man regarded killing as an art and he wasn't late to admit to himself that although morbid, Tyki's hits generally did turn out rather like pieces of art for the people who were actually able to look at them without throwing up.

Still, Allen supposed that the lack of likeness could be attributed to the fact that Tyki Mikk was in one way or another rather fucked up mentally already, as he had not only one but two different personalities that he kept on switching between; one perfectly reasonable and mildly sarcastic and one sadistic and partially psychotic. Nowadays, Allen himself got along quite well with both actually, at least whenever Dark Tyki was not planning to kill him.

On the other hand, being in the mafia really did help to keep him on his toes and Allen's finely honed instincts had kept him alive for the four years that had passed since he had been brought before the Millennium Earl, the illusive boss of the Noah Family, or "reclaimed" as they preferred on seeing it, seeing to the fact that both his real father and Mana had been members at some point. That is, until his real father, who he had only ever known as Uncle Neah, tried to assassinate the Earl in a gamble to become the leader of the Family himself, an endeavour which had obviously failed and consequently been the death of both him and his wife while his brother Mana had taken Allen and fled to England.

They had somehow managed to stay hidden for about ten years, but once he knew that they had been discovered Mana had called in a favour from one of Neah's acquaintances, Cross Marian, begging him to take care of Allen while Mana himself went to lead their pursuers away from their trail. He had never returned, of course, and Allen assumed that he was sleeping with the fishes on the bottom of the ocean or something like that.

Allen had then stayed with Cross for a couple of months, somehow making a living through playing poker and other sorts of gambling, as Cross had obviously been far more concerned with attaining more alcohol than actually taking care of him. He did teach him to shoot a gun however, which was a skill that Allen found very useful later in life, especially after he left Cross and went to live on the street, finding a fairly comfortable place to stay beneath one of the bridges in the area. He hadn't been there for that long however, a month at most, before the Noah Family tracked down and captured him, putting him out with some drugs before shipping him off to one of the Family's houses in either Portugal or Spain, to be able to induct him into the Family without disruptions from other mafia organizations or national authorities.

Over there, he had not only gotten to know Tyki Mikk, but also come face to face for the first time with his father's and likely also his foster-father's killer, the man going by the name of the Millennium Earl, mafia boss, criminal mastermind and his paternal uncle to the boot, who for some reason had ordered his men to bring him into the Family. Maybe it was because Allen had shown some sort of promise or maybe it was because the Earl suddenly felt some sort of twisted attachment to his nephew, his own flesh and blood almost, even when said man had killed his own brothers in cold blood.

Even with a fairly big Family, the Earl still didn't have any children of his own and wasn't very likely to conceive any either. As such, Allen himself was by blood the closest thing to an heir the man would ever get, even if very few of those high up in the hierarchy of the Family would stand for that; Allen himself hadn't paid much attention to this though as it was pointless either way to worry about such things when he already had his hands full when it came to living a reasonably normal life, balancing his studies with his duties as a member of the Family.

At fifteen, he was not only an accomplished scholar but also a fairly accomplished gatherer of intelligence and gunner, although his sniping skills still needed some work, mostly since he was rarely able to utilize them; the Earl seemed to be planning on keeping his hands as clean as possible at least up to that point, as if the man himself wanted some sort of safeguard.

Even so, Allen had killed for the first time when he was thirteen, like a baptism of fire as he shot a bullet through the head of a traitor to the Family. Since then he had killed at least ten people, most of them by gunshot but also a couple by stabbing and poisoning; he had never been given any high profile assignments though, as he was to stay low while a person like Tyki took care of the flashier ones, like politicians, police commissioners and members of rival families.

At first, during the time following his first kill, Allen had honestly thought he was going to go crazy; he was seeing shadows on the walls and in mirrors, constantly stalking him with these big grins on their faces, and he had come pretty close to an actual breakdown before Tyki – the sane one – finally caught on and pulled him aside, telling him that the shadows were not there to hurt him at all, that they were mere figments of his imagination or there to protect him or whatever. Allen did calm down somewhat after that, but more likely because of Tyki's voice rather than anything the twenty-something-year-old had actually said.

Allen still saw them sometimes however, the shadows, and couldn't help but wonder if they were something more than mere figments of his imagination, like ghosts of his victims or whatever or demons or something, but in the end he supposed that they were irrelevant as they did not hold the key to his continued survival within the Family.

For a person with supposedly so little to live for, seeing to the fact that he had already lost everything he might've been even remotely willing to die for, Allen was surprisingly adamant when it came to his resolution that he wouldn't die no matter what, at least not until the Earl himself was dead and buried six feet deep and stayed that way for at least ten years during which Allen would make it an annual tradition to dance upon that bastard's grave.

The Earl himself had chuckled when Allen had presented this scenario to him, cleverly disguised as a joke of course, but Allen knew that it wasn't very likely to become anything more than that since if and in such case when and how the Earl finally bit the dust would be of great importance to him and his continued survival, which was the main reason as to why he hadn't tried to kill the bastard yet, because Allen himself wasn't suicidal enough to try as he was well aware of what would likely happen to him in case the Earl met his unfortunate – although certainly well deserved – end, especially if it was by his hand.

**- o0o -**

To some, he was merely Allen Walker, a teenager with a talent for languages and getting himself into trouble, along with getting himself out of it with most people none the wiser. Also possessing a certain aptitude in terms of technology, he was capable of constructing working electronic devices from what most other people had discarded as trash although his skill of his, like many others, had obviously gotten a bit rusty since he hadn't gotten to use it for a while.

To some, he was merely the successor to the Fourteenth, or as some put it, the "New" Fourteenth. Allen simply couldn't help but snort at the irony of him carrying the same title his father had during his time in the organization, especially when said father had eventually planned a _coup d'etat_ and gotten executed as a result.

To some, he was merely known by his codename, a rather cheesy one if he had be able to say so himself, Silver Bullet, because of his white hair, pale complexion, silver-grey eyes and firing accuracy, along with of course the fact that Tyki liked the drink and that Allen himself had been forced to choose between the names Silver Bullet and Bloody Mary. And obviously, there was no way in Hell Allen would ever refer to himself or let others refer to him as Bloody Mary.

Back in the days, the Fourteenth had also been known as the Pianist or simply as the Musician, likely for the man's talent when it came to handling musical instruments; it was either that or his rather nasty habit of using piano-wire to strangle people he didn't like. Either way, Allen himself had seemingly inherited at least a part of the man's talents, at least in terms of music because he really hadn't tried his luck with the piano-wire yet; maybe mastering that would become his next side-project or something.

**- o0o -**

Arriving home from school around half past four in the afternoon, Allen swiftly went up to the rented apartment he had been more or less referring to as his home for the better part of the latest three years, unlocking the door and slipping inside before locking it behind him.

He immediately went to his laptop, plugging it in and putting it on before entering the apartment's kitchenette to fetch a bite. He came back into the room with a bag of crisps under his arm and a bottle of coke in the other, having decided to screw the healthy alternative since he had this feeling that he was going to need the additional energy. Putting the food items down, he swiftly typed in his password, leaning back in his office chair while the computer loaded; it was getting a bit too slow to his liking and he was thinking about asking for a new one, as a birthday present or something like that, or as he' would probably phrase it, as a necessary expense for him to be able to continue being somewhat useful in terms of cyber terrorism.

_You have one new unread message._

It had been classified spam mail by the filters in the program handling his emails, but Allen knew it for what it was and clicked on it, even if it did look a lot like the ones that would possibly contain a virus or a Trojan, a worm or just anything that could be considered as remotely harmful for one's computer system or bank account or both, but Allen knew that the layout was perfectly intentional, because obviously it was rather hard to send secret encoded messages to people in today's society with all these watching authorities and all, so what better method was there to secretly contact someone than by sending them and a lot of other uninvolved people a lot of spam-looking mail?

To say the least, the system could be seen as fairly ingenious, as it had been used for years and hadn't been discovered yet, mainly because the Family sent their "secret" messages out to a whole lot of people that were completely uninvolved which in turn made sure that their actual members could easily hide within the mass of people who'd no basic idea about what the mail actually contained, especially so if the system somehow got discovered for what it was. The mails were basically spam to begin with, if one ignored the small and barely noticeable symbols that appeared all over the pictures featured in them, although they were put in places where they were either not noticed by someone who wasn't looking for them or simply put in such a way that they looked like a decoration, like they were part of a fancy background or something.

The symbols themselves had once upon a time been created as a joint project by Mana and Neah Walker back when they were mere children as a way to send secret messages to each other, and were further developed later on when they had needed to communicate about matters that they didn't wish for the other members of the Family to know about. Later on, after Neah had died and Mana had spirited Allen off to England, the Earl had apparently uncovered the full extent of Neah's encoded information and had apparently attempted to decode it without success.

It was Allen that had provided him with the means to do so, soon after he'd been brought back into the Family. Although Mana had never actually taught him about it or intended for him to learn it in the first place, he had still managed to pick it up somehow from somewhere and in his childlike and terrified mind he had simply given the Earl the information the man had needed simply because the man had attempted to coax it out of him. As such, he had – without ever intending it – indirectly provided the Family with a way to communicate without the authorities ever knowing about it as only high ranked and trusted members of the Family knew how to decipher the symbols and piece together the message they conveyed.

Having finished decoding the message – it took really no time at all because he was fairly used to reading it – Allen couldn't resist rolling his eyes at it, before he swiftly deleted it and hunched forward, leaning onto his elbows. _Damn… I think I'm going to need at least a Barrett M82 for this one…_ _I have to check what they have in stock…_

Checking his watch, he swiftly calculated that he needed to do so in the next three hours or so if he wanted to have time to get where he needed to be in order to make it before his deadline. He devoured whatever food and drink was in his immediate vicinity before having a swift change of clothing before continuing with other small preparations. When he was nearly done, he made his way towards the door, catching sight of his reflection in the hall mirror.

A dark shadow was hovering over him and his hair looked unusually messy with white tresses having collected themselves into what looked like a fair impression of the gravity-defying spikes certain anime characters liked to pretend was their hair. Yes, Allen had watched anime at one point, though mostly in order to make sure he wouldn't forget his Japanese and have to relearn it all over again, and not because he found it utterly enjoyable or anything like that.

Allen sighed, smoothing out the worst of it before pulling on a jacket and making it out the door, slamming it shut behind him and locking it.

His steps echoed in the otherwise empty stairwell before he disappeared out into the twilight zone.

**- o0o -**


	2. The Decoder

**- o0o -**

**The Decoder**

**- o0o -**

Lavi Bookman had always been a curious child, curious enough to land himself in a lot of trouble and curious enough to get himself killed someday, as he made a habit of "knowing too much" about a lot of things.

His favourite areas of obsession mostly consisted of things mafia-related, ranging everywhere from law and politics to drugs and psychology; he was filled to the brim with this intense desire to understand how these people worked, how they lived their lives and what made them tick. It was an odd obsession; he knew that much without anyone telling him, but then again he could always refer to past occurrences to justify his perceived need to understand the mafia and how they interacted with the rest of the world.

Bookman wasn't his actual surname; it was a name he had been given when he had been taken in by the actual Bookman, an old geezer working part-time with acupuncturist at a private clinic although he should by all rights have fully retired.

However, soon after having moved in with the cranky old man, Lavi came to the realisation that there was more to the man than the fact that he looked old enough to be 120, with or without the black makeup he always had smeared around his eyes. The aforementioned made him look remarkably much like a panda, something which the old man did not appreciate being noted and pointed out. Lavi had to learn about it the hard way by being whacked numerous times in the head with a paper fan; Lavi still called the old man that however, merely to annoy him. Lavi did find a lot of entertainment in calling people unwanted nicknames simply for the sake of riling them up, but on the other hand, it was beside the point.

As it turned out, Bookman had more secrets than his actual given name, one which Lavi had yet to figure out surprisingly. As it turned out, Bookman was just as obsessed about he was, just as thorough, just as nosy, prying into other people's business and obviously getting away with it.

Bookman had an archive, a collection of files, and nearly all of these files contained information on either the police or the mafia, and, more often than not, both. Family members, secret informants, infiltrators, collaborators, financers, the whole shebang… Secret hideouts, hierarchical structures… even extensive reports on certain individuals and their respective smoking and drinking habits, and if so what brands they preferred and other insanely detailed stuff like that.

Lavi wasn't much for the whole memorising people's drinking habits, but he recognised a potential goldmine of information when he saw one and besides, even if he tried his luck with hacking into the police's criminal database he probably wouldn't even come near the amount his old man had somehow gotten his greedy hands on… however he had managed to do so in the first place.

Still, even with Lavi and his obsession with the mafia overall, he still had his preferences; the ever illusive Noah Family was the one he had come to view as his main target, mostly because it likely held the key to his own past as well.

Still, even with the goldmine of information he had at hand, his breakthrough in regards to the Noah Family was nowhere to be seen, even six years after he had started digging into it for real. The old man always said that he was far too stubborn for his own good, even when the puzzle pieces themselves and their rightful position evaded him. But he needed to know, not for sentimental reasons or anything like that, but simply to satisfy his own undying curiosity. After all, what was the point in pursuing something if you always gave up halfway when you didn't make any headway? Besides, Lavi liked puzzles; he had always liked puzzles, he had always liked piecing things together to form a unit of meaning, to shed some light on the mysterious things he sometimes encountered in everyday life. Letters, numbers, symbols…

He had always held a strange kind of fascination for them, always amused himself with random lines of them, trying to decipher them, to find meaning in them. Most of the time there weren't any and other times the messages which could be found were probably completely unintentional, created by chance.

But, when he opened his inbox one fateful morning and opened one of his received email messages, which looked like regular spam at the first glance, he just realised that there was something distinctively odd about it. Odd, not to mention strangely familiar.

Lavi Bookman had a good memory – not quite photographic but probably eidetic – and as such he could immediately tell that the spam was remarkably similar to another one he'd gotten a few months previous.

A single green eye, the one which was not covered up by the eye patch he normally wore, widened momentarily before a wide grin spread across his face. That strange feeling from earlier, a suspicion that there had indeed been something there, had suddenly turned into something else, a hunch, and it was as though a light had gone up for him. Those odd-looking symbols turning up in inconspicuous places, hidden in the background…

"It's a code," he breathed out, feeling all giddy inside at the prospect of his most recent discovery. "It's obviously a code… Why didn't I notice it earlier?"

He realized immediately that he would need more samples and he searched in his memories, trying to recall where he had seen those symbols before since he knew he had. Chewing on his bottom lip, he considered the matter for a while.

Although he was as of yet unable to decipher any kind of meaning whatsoever from those symbols he had spotted, if things were as he suspected then someone was using spam messages to hide something else within them, something which could only be read by certain recipients of the message itself, an encoded message.

Now that he thought about it, it all made sense somehow, if those symbols were really a part of some hidden message; untapped lines of communication were of essence for criminal organizations, and while the internet made it easier to keep track on exchanged information it also provided a flood of information to hide bits and pieces of an actual message in. So, why not use spam then and send it to a lot of people, hundreds or even hundreds of thousands, in order not to call any attention to the members at the receiving end, those who actually caught the actual encrypted message? After all, if someone sent a coded message to a hundred people or more, it would be next to impossible for the police to find all those who had gotten the actual coded message, meaning that even if the police somehow managed to decipher the code itself it would still be next to impossible to separate members from innocent people who were oblivious as to what the message was, which in turn meant that it was virtually impossible to catch anyone other than possibly the sender.

_I really need that sample_, he thought, dutifully copying down the set of symbols on a post-it note, all while conveniently forgetting all about the history exam he was really supposed to study for; he needed to solve mysteries after all and as such, schoolwork and exams were quite low on his list of priorities. Besides, he was pretty smart so if he really needed a job he would probably be able to figure something out. If nothing else worked then he would simply have to resort to blackmail and really, he had a lot of blackmail.

**- o0o -**

A couple of sleepless hours later, Lavi was brought out of his deep state of thoughtfulness and into a full state of stressed out panic as he, with a slice of toast still in his mouth, dumped all of his course books into his backpack before zipping it closed and heaving it onto his shoulder, staggering briefly at the change in weight before he sat down on a nearby chair to tie his shoes, cursing under his breath while doing so. "Shit, shit, shit, I'm gonna be so late…"

Then he was out the door, barely remembering to close and lock it before he sprinted off in direction of the bus stop, arriving there just in time to see his bus driving away from him. "Crap," he breathed out, summarizing his situation up pretty nicely.

Oh well, if he remembered correctly then there would be another coming along about ten minutes later. As such, he simply sat himself down on the bench at the bus stop, studying the dark gray clouds floating overhead. _It looks like it's gonna rain_, he mused silently.

**- o0o -**

That day was just like any other day in the screwed up life of Allen Walker, any shitty day at least. He had arrived home fairly late the day before, courtesy of a sniping mission, and had upon his arrival back home more or less thrown himself on the bed without bothering to do much else, simply wanting to sleep for a very long time. His alarm clock begged to differ however, when it oh-so-conveniently woke him up at half past six in the morning. Indeed, such a splendid start of the day would have been enough to put anyone in a pretty foul mood and somehow, the day really didn't seem to be getting any better.

He had stale cornflakes and water for breakfast, as some idiot – he himself – had apparently forgotten to buy not only milk but also bread and other useful stuff one might even have the slightest desire to eat for breakfast, or lunch, or even dinner. He got dressed, stowed the most recently used weapons into the closet, downed an aspirin and a glass of water as a pre-emptive measure before he finally started assembling all the stuff he needed for a day at school and shoved it into his satchel, the one he regularly used for school, though not before dropping a bottle of pepper spray into it. One could never be too careful and in truth, he had every reason to be, considering his track record and all, and even if it wasn't a gun, at least it was something. Besides, it was an item which he would be able to provide a proper explanation for in the rather unlikely case that someone actually looked through his bag.

After having accomplished all of that, he went for a swift visit to the bathroom to verify what he had already kind of taken for granted; he looked like he hadn't slept properly in days and overall that wasn't very far from the truth. What would he be using as an excuse this week? Gaming? Late-night TV-series? Him staying up late to play _Assassin's Creed_? On second thought, any excuse would likely do as few people paid much attention to him anyway, even if he did stand out with his white hair and scarred face and all.

He got his shoes on and pulled on his jacket before bending down to fetch the satchel from the floor and slinging it over his shoulder. Then he turned around briefly to survey the somewhat dishevelled state of his apartment, checking to make sure that there wasn't anything remotely incriminating lying around in plain sight before he went out the door and locked it behind him.

**- o0o -**

The shitty day had turned to worse when he had gotten about halfway to school, when he – using his unmatched ability to get into trouble – had somehow managed to get himself right in the middle of a gunfight between some random rivalling groups of extremists simply because he hadn't paid enough attention to his surroundings, as he had been far too busy trying to get to school on time. Once he had ended up in the pickle he had however, there was little else for him to do than to duck and scramble for cover, which proved to be quite difficult as there really weren't any in his immediate vicinity, at least not if one disregarded the dumpster which was just a few metres away from him.

In short, Allen had been forced to make a quick decision; his dignity or his life. As he had chosen the latter, he had swiftly thrown aside whatever dignity he might have been holding onto previously and gone dumpster-diving in a very literal way at an appropriate moment when everybody else was far too busy trying to kill each other to notice him doing it. If anything, he should've wanted to use that moment of inattention to get the Hell out of there, but, as both of his potential escape routes were at the time showered with stray bullets, he decided to hide out for a while. Split-second decisions between life and death; in his life, they were pretty common.

And so, he stayed there in the dumpster, cursing the fact that he had not brought a gun along after all and the fact that he hadn't seen this coming before he ended up right in the middle of it. Gunfights like these were not really very common occurrences, not in a city like this, not in the country either, and as such it had managed to surprise him, to throw him off balance. He prayed, to no deity in particular, that he would get out of this with his life, because really, dying in a dumpster was not the way he wanted to leave this world. Having his bullet-riddled bleeding carcass dumped into one didn't sound all that tempting either. As such, he stayed put, keeping quiet and suppressing the rising sense of panic that came over him; he had never been good with cramped, dark and stinking places and the fact that they were firing bullets like crazy not that far away from where he was really didn't help. He pulled out a handkerchief from his bag and held it over his nose and mouth, trying to control his breathing, trying to keep calm.

It didn't matter that he had been a member of the mafia for years or that he had killed for the first time when he was thirteen and it didn't matter that he had killed at least a dozen people through various means; trained killer or not, he was still human and still a young teen in many aspects. He had his weaknesses and his fears and there were really very little he could do about them, at the moment at least.

In silence, he waited, finding nothing else to do but counting the shots. 1…2…3…75…86… God damn it, where the Hell was law enforcement when one actually needed them?

**- o0o -**


	3. The Hunter and the Hunted

**- o0o -**

**The Hunter and the Hunted**

**- o0o -**

A dark-haired man in his late teens stepped off onto the subway train station, holding a guitar case in one hand and lifting a seemingly heavy satchel onto one of his shoulders using the other, surveying the general area with a remarkably displeased look on his face, scowling darkly at the crowd as it poured around him on his way to the exit.

The scowl only darkened when a random passerby had the nerve to loudly remark on his longish and undeniably well-groomed hair, going as far as to call him girlish due to the high ponytail he had his hair tied up in, upon which there was a noticeable twitch from the scowling man as his hand seemingly on its own started wandering closer to the case he was holding in his other. He took deep breaths, closing his eyes while pulling back into himself and into his inner sanctuary for a moment, but this place was noisy; too noisy. His eyes – carrying a dark colour of blue so that they almost seemed black – snapped open and he stalked off in direction of the stairs leading up above, his long black leather trench coat nearly billowing behind him as he did so. His stride was determined and swift and he cut through the dissipating crowd without much difficulty, manoeuvring his guitar case with ease. Once he got above ground, he threw a disdainful look at his immediate surroundings before hailing a cab.

"Where to, sir?" the cabdriver, a man of seemingly Indian descent, inquired, his tone rising towards the end.

"Westminster, Gerard Place," the young man grunted out, still scowling at nothing in particular, holding his guitar case close.

"It's that China place, right?" the cabdriver asked, receiving the bare hint of a nod for an answer. "Off to see some relatives, are you?"

The scowl deepened. "I'm Japanese," the man in the backseat corrected with a snort, temporarily abandoning the scowl to stare out the window. "And I'm off to get some remotely eatable cuisine in this godforsaken country, not to visit anyone… not yet," he added that last part after a brief pause, as if hesitant or thoughtful, accompanied by a heavy sigh before he continued looking out the window.

"So you are off to visit someone special then, hmmm?" the cabdriver inquired, adjusting his sunglasses and leaning forward onto the wheel, sighing longingly while waiting for the temporary traffic stocking to clear up some. "A brother perhaps, or a long lost lover, maybe?"

The Japanese man sneered at the cabdriver's antics. "If anything, then I'd say it would be the latter," he then snorted, leaning back against the seat to stare at the cab's ceiling.

The other positively squealed at this. "So it is a lover then, you lucky little lady-killer in the back," he said, turning left and driving along a side street. "So where are you going to meet her, this fated girl of yours? Somewhere romantic, right?"

The man in the backseat looked up, his dark blue eyes glaring at the driver for a few moments before once again turning his eyes away, watching the traffic pass by with a seemingly uninterested look on his face. "The morgue."

"Huh?" the eccentric cabdriver looked up, staring at his passenger in the backseat with a great deal of surprise.

"The morgue," the passenger repeated, continuing to watch the traffic. "She was murdered four days ago and I've been called over here to positively identify her and help out with the continued investigation."

"Oh," the driver said, looking decidedly put out at this, saddened even. "So, who was she?" he then asked, curiosity winning over any attempts to leave the possibly grieving man in peace.

"My fiancé," the other snapped, glaring at him for a moment before continuing to look out the window. "The wedding would have taken place at the end of the month, when she got home to Japan. Is there anything more that you desperately need to know or will you _please_ shut up and take me to Gerard Place?"

The cabdriver remained silent for a moment, taking another turn before he spoke again, his voice almost sombre. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said, his voice sincere. "I had a dream once too, so I think I can understand part of what you're going through…"

The dark-haired passenger snorted. "And what sort of a dream was that?"

The Indian man smiled, readjusting his sunglasses. "To become the greatest chef on the planet or at least to open up my own restaurant in a chic place such as this one," he said with a laugh. "I never had the money though, so here I am, driving a cab in the city I dreamed of… isn't life ironic?" he continued, his voice cheerful.

"Truly," the passenger agreed, mostly to himself. Or maybe he wasn't listening.

"We're here now, Gerard Place, Westminster," the cabdriver said suddenly, slowing down before coming to a stop. "That'll be-…"

"Keep the change," the Japanese man growled, depositing a bundle of cash onto the front seat as he climbed out of the vehicle with the case still in a firm grip as he strode in direction of the restaurant further down the street.

The driver stared at the bundle of money, surprised and quite shocked too before he found himself somewhat and shouted after his passenger. "Thanks for the tip, daaaarling!"

**- o0o -**

After what had seemed like an eternity in darkness, a pair of silver-gray eyes finally snapped open at the familiar knocking on the dumpster he had taken shelter in. "Tyki?" he finally asked in reply, somewhat hesitantly.

The lid was lifted and a pair of amber-coloured eyes peered down at him just a tad suspiciously before suddenly the familiar face was split by a wide grin. "The one and only," Tyki Mikk acknowledged, reaching down to pull him out. "Though I must admit that having you text me right in the middle of an important assignment did prove to be just a tad inconvenient on my end…"

"Well, sorry," Allen muttered, climbing out of the dumpster.

The Portuguese man eyed his dirty and dishevelled state with keen amusement. "Lucky for you that my place is pretty close," he said, lighting a cigarette. "You can use my shower if you want, to get cleaned up. I can help out if you want, since I now seem to have some time to kill and all…"

Allen shot him a dirty look.

Tyki's smirk broadened some.

**- o0o -**

Human contact was rarely something that appealed to him, but in the position he was in, Allen could very much see at least some advantages to it, even relish in it, as capable hands directed a towel through his still dripping white tresses, nimble fingers through the towel drying and massaging his scalp at the same time. The fingers running through his hair was nimble and strong and belonged to a pair of hands that were those of a killer – a sophisticated one, but still a killer; an assassin.

Allen's eyes snapped open suddenly and Tyki's motions stilled. "Something's bothering you," Tyki said, his voice sounding unnaturally sombre as the towel was removed and hung to dry.

"I could say the same thing about you," Allen responded, eyeing the older man and his movements. The white-haired teen's senses were tingling, as if there was danger lurking somewhere nearby. "What's bothering you, Tyki?"

"Few things bother me, _anjo_," Tyki replied, snickering softly.

It sounded forced.

Allen's eyes narrowed. "Stop with that annoying nickname," he muttered, swatting Tyki's hand away when it tried to smoothen his hair. "I'm not a child anymore."

"You are a child," Tyki insisted.

"A teenager," Allen corrected, the slightest hint of annoyance seeping into his voice. "I'm fifteen already, almost sixteen. I'll be a grown man before you know it… granted that I manage to stay alive for a couple of years yet… I guess."

"You will always be a boy to me, Allen," Tyki insisted, snickering as he ruffled his hair. "I remember the time when the Earl had you brought in… a scared little white-haired child who lay crying in his bed for an entire day…"

"I got over it," Allen insisted, getting a bit embarrassed at the reminder of this younger more pathetic version of himself.

Tyki's fingers were on his neck, slipping around his throat from behind. An involuntary shiver ran through him, even though he could sense no killing intent from the man standing behind him. _"Fear is good,"_ Tyki said, slipping into his native tongue. Allen, already used to it, barely noticed. _"Fear is a tool which works both ways, as a tool for hunting down one's prey as well as a tool for one's own survival. Fear can keep us alive."_

"Too much fear can paralyse," Allen retorted in English.

"A prey, most certainly," Tyki agreed, removing his fingers from the teen's throat before leaning in close. "But are you a prey, Allen?"

As if by a will of its own, Allen's right hand shot up and seized the man by the throat, fingers positioned and ready to deliver death with just a bit of pressure. "I am a hunter," Allen said, his eyes clear as relinquished his grip on Tyki's throat and turned around to face him again.

"And make sure you stay that way," Tyki said, seizing him by the chin and tilting his head backwards, turning his face upwards and looking him deeply in the eye. "Being the hunter is fun, but being hunted is not… but you do have a bit of experience in that department already, have you not, Silver Bullet?"

Allen made a slight grimace. Then he rubbed his forehead, feeling another migraine coming on. "I hate that codename," he said. "Why can't I get a cooler one?"

"Because you haven't done anything to earn one," Tyki snickered, prying his fingers away from his scalp in order to get his own in place, feeling around more thoroughly this time around. "You're awfully tense, you know that?"

"I am, for natural reasons, but don't change the subject," Allen said, forcing his body to relax. "Even Uncle Neah-…"

"Being the Pianist or not, the Fourteenth is a sensitive subject," Tyki cut off, sounding a bit impatient for the first time and Allen could sense it in his movements. "I myself hold no personal grudge against him for what he did or rather attempted, but there are others in the Family who really haven't let go of it yet… even though the man himself has been dead and buried for years already."

"And that grudge automatically transferred to me when I was brought into the Family, right?" Allen asked, though it was more of a statement than a question anyway.

"Not entirely," Tyki replied, his fingers leaving Allen's head in favour of his shoulders. "The Fourteenth was a man who was both hated and respected for his talents. Whatever reasons he might've had, he made a really bad decision. He made a gamble and he lost, so he died. End of story."

He paused briefly. "The thing is," he then said, kneading with renewed effort, skilful hands leaving warm and tingling skin in their wake. "Most of the members of the Family do not hate you merely because you are the Fourteenth's son. In fact, most of them would very much like to see you die a long and painful death – many of them would like to ensure it happened too – simply because they are under the impression that you are the Earl's new favourite."

"Gee, I wonder how that happened," Allen muttered.

Not that there was much to wonder about. Misunderstandings happened. Some people were obviously too damn blind not to be able tell the difference between being someone's favourite and being someone's favourite clown. Jester. Joker.

Joker?

"Hey, Tyki," Allen said. "Who decides all these codenames anyway?"

Tyki blinked, pausing in his movements. "The Earl, usually. How so?"

"Could you ask him to change mine?" Allen asked, tilting his head backwards. "I mean, I am already kind of his favourite clown and court jester anyway, so why not call me Joker and be done with it?"

"And why again would he listen to me?" Tyki asked, sounding highly amused as he leaned closer. "For that matter… if anyone's that man's personal jester, I am."

"True," Allen readily agreed. "But you got over it."

"Maybe," Tyki replied. "But what if I didn't?"

"If you didn't, then a time will come when you will snap and go ape shit on all of us during a Family get-together, commit a bloody massacre, butcher a lot of people and then you would calm down, take a shower, redress and go play poker with your buddies," Allen finished, his voice deadpan.

Tyki chuckled. "It would be my honest pleasure," he then purred. Then he pulled back, letting go of him.

Allen turned around, moving his shoulders. They ached a bit. "So what's bothering you?" he asked. "Is part of the family planning my untimely demise… again?"

And again and again. But he didn't need to mention that, since Tyki knew all about it. Kind of. Almost. Not really. Not all of it. There had been numerous attempts after all, and most of them had been rather amateurish. Some of them hadn't. If it wasn't for his excessive amount of paranoia, good instincts and overall training he would no doubt have ended up six feet under a long time ago. Then again, it was entirely possible that they just hadn't gotten serious yet. On second thought, it was likely the latter. Yes, definitely.

"So who is it this time around?" Allen asked, suppressing a yawn. He was too tired to deal with this kind of shit. "Is it Sheryl again?"

"No," Tyki responded shortly. "Sheryl won't try again. The twins think you're too entertaining to kill. Skin Bolic doesn't care about you. Lulu wouldn't go against the Earl and Road is simply infatuated…"

Allen gave a noticeable shudder.

Road was a pretty little girl and all; Allen just had this slight problem with her sadistic tendencies, courtesy of the knife she had staked through his left palm not long after he had officially joined the family. Then again, there were also the stalker tendencies to worry about, but since reoccurring murder attempts were not an issue with her, Allen didn't consider her that much of a threat. Not to him at least, but possibly to some of those girls at this school who were apparently crushing on him. Not that he cared or anything; he had his own share of problems to worry about.

"Not counting the Earl, this means that there are five people from the Family who are likely either themselves trying to or hiring others to try to kill me, according to you, right?" he then asked, tilting his head to the side.

"Four," Tyki responded with a shrug. "Wisely's useless."

"That still leaves four upstanding members of the Family who are possibly plotting my imminent doom," Allen replied, tilting his head to the other side. "It's not as bad as I expected."

There was a brief silence between them, broken only by Tyki's footsteps as he left for the kitchen and a muffled clatter of porcelain before he re-entered the living room, carrying a tray with tea and biscuits. He gingerly placed it down on the coffee-table before looking up at Allen, who had repositioned himself to the sofa. "I wonder," Tyki said out loud and Allen looked up in response, curious. "Why have you never considered the possibility of me plotting to kill you, with me being the top assassin and all?"

Allen's expression turned from curious to vaguely amused in a heartbeat. "Why in the world would you kill the only remotely sane person in the Family besides maybe yourself?" he then asked, smiling. "Imagine the family dinners… all alone and not a single remotely sane individual in sight…"

There was a noticeable twitch in one of Tyki's eyebrows. Then he shrugged. "You know me far too well."

Allen hid his emerging grin behind his teacup. To be completely honest, he wasn't all that worried about the prospect of other Family members plotting to kill him; he already knew that quite a few of them would very much like to see him die prematurely, and he also knew that quite a few of them would very much like to have a hand in his premature death and had also shown themselves to be quite eager in trying to provide it, so in truth Allen himself was not all that worried. He was fairly used to this kind of scenario overall and besides, if he had managed to make it this far then the risk that he would be dropping dead anytime in the near future was exaggerated. Then again, there was that annoying little fact that his senses had gone all tingly again, making him tense up slightly in response.

He closed his eyes briefly, focusing on his inner thoughts while trying to reach a certain feeling of calmness. _I am a hunter, I am a hunter, I am a hunter…_

Still, the feeling of imminent danger lingered, clinging to him like the scent of tobacco clung to Tyki's clothes. Vaguely, but still very much there.

**- o0o -**

Kanda Yu eyed his surroundings with an extreme amount of distaste while the police officers finished with whatever they had been doing – checking that he was in fact the person they themselves had asked for, probably – only to look at him with those annoying pitying eyes, accompanied by occasional words of condolences. "I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Yu."

Pointless words of condolences and looks of pity aside, as if he wasn't sufficiently irritated already, they just had to get that part wrong as well; addressing him with his given – hated – name. Had they not been fools that were completely ignorant of proper culture and customs, he would no doubt have delivered a blow or two – with or without the _bokken_ he had somehow gotten through the customs at the airport – to restore his honour after having suffered through such rudeness. "Kanda," he corrected through gritted teeth, barely resisting a sudden urge to snarl at them. "Yu is my given name. Kanda is my surname. In Japan, the order of the name is reversed."

_And it's considered extremely rude to speak to anyone using their given name, especially without any appropriate suffixes, unless said person has given their permission for one to do so… you culturally ignorant monkeys._

"Let's just get this over with," Kanda eventually said, his positively frigid voice cutting through the rather awkward silence which had followed his earlier statement. "Let me see her."

**- o0o -**

She was still beautiful, even with the gruesome gashes covering her body, disfiguring her somewhat. Still, Kanda supposed it could have been much worse; according to the coroner, most of her injuries had been inflicted post-mortem and there had been no signs of her having been subjected to any kind of physical torture, so Kanda silently took comfort in that.

Little could be done about the fact that she, his fiancé Alma Karma, would be returning with him to Japan in a coffin – or an urn, since she had mentioned at some point that she would rather be cremated than buried six feet deep in the ground – but not before Kanda had found the person who did this to her. And no, he held no intention whatsoever in handing that person over to the police; he would be sending that person to Hell with his bare hands if he needed to. And no, he had no intention whatsoever in being merciful; that person would suffer until Kanda himself decided that it was time to deal the finishing blow.

**- o0o -**

When Kanda stepped out of the coroner's office on that day, he had a clear goal in mind. Instead of heading to the hotel he had been arranged to stay at, he headed back to Gerard Place. This time however, he headed there with anything but food on his mind. Arriving just a few minutes before closing time and being the only guest in the restaurant, Kanda invited himself into the kitchen, to the great surprise of the chef and the young waitress who had been chatting animatedly in Chinese up until the point of him alerting them to his presence with a slight cough.

Their initial reaction to his presence following the surprise had been fear, and not an ordinary kind of fear either but rather the kind that he himself was rather familiar with, having encountered it time and again in his "work". It did not take very long for the chef, a Chinese male in his late twenties or early thirties, to step forward a bit, hiding the younger waitress – a girl in her late teens of the same ethnicity – partially behind his back, providing a shield between her and Kanda. It may just have been an instinctual thing, but Kanda had a distinct feeling that it was not so, especially not when the older man smiled disarmingly at him and politely asked him in English whether there was anything they could possibly help him with. "I need info," he responded, relaxing his posture slightly to accentuate the fact that he wasn't a threat.

The chef nodded slightly before turning back to the waitress, who warily eyed their exchange. "Lenalee, your shift will be over in a few minutes so you can go upstairs and start on your homework," the man said, picking up a towel to wipe his hands. "I'll clean up what's left, alright?"

**- o0o -**

A few minutes later, Kanda emerged from the restaurant with a note in his hand with a name and a cell phone number written on it in the chef's, Komui Lee's, somewhat sloppy handwriting. _Bookman._

It was already late in the day; he would continue his search in the morning.

**- o0o -**

Lavi Bookman was humming rather cheerfully along with the melody of the pop song that was playing on his MP3-player as he stepped out of the library, swinging his much heavier backpack over his shoulder before making his way down the stairs at a hurried pace, his lips twitching in his efforts to keep his face from breaking out in a wide grin as he flashed a victory sign to no one in particular (earning himself a rather odd look from a couple of passer-bys). Finally! Finally! Finally some headway in his research!

After hours and hours of fruitless searching amongst the most obscure shelves he would have thought of, Lavi had finally encountered something that looked even remotely like the strange set of symbols he had rather obsessively tried to interpret, all while neglecting his latest assignment of course. After all, schoolwork didn't hold a candle against cracking codes in his book, regardless of whether the old man (and his classmates for that matter) claimed he was an idiot. Oh well, oh well. It was their loss after all. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Either way, Lavi felt that he was now much closer to solving the rather intriguing puzzle he had before him and surprisingly enough his latest clue had quite literally fallen down and hit him in the head. Evidently, it had hurt a lot but afterwards Lavi thought that the bump on his head was worth it when he had glanced at the contents, feeling a sudden rush of excitement come over him and temporarily override the pain from having the thick tome fall on top of him and nearly knocking his brains loose. He had only needed to take one quick look at the symbols in the book to notice the great similarity they held to the ones he was investigating. Evidently, they were not identical by any means but there was still something, a similarity which was too great to be a coincidence, in his mind at least. Ogham writing… was it really that simple?

The Ogham alphabet, named after the Irish God Ogma. _Ogham craobh, beth luis fearn, beth luis nion…_

To use a modified version of an alphabet that fell out of use ages ago; whoever would have thought of such a thing? And who else but a few dedicated linguists would even know how to read such a thing, or even notice the similarities? After all, the signs were certainly discreet enough to be mistaken as mere decoration by anyone who wasn't specifically looking for them. It was bloody ingenious! Whoever had thought of such a thing, Lavi would very much like to take a good look at their face some time, or even better, to pick their brain, but that last one was only secondary.

Then again, strongly suspecting he was getting closer to cracking the code, he found himself wondering about other things that he had mostly neglected to think about while trying to find a pattern and getting the code; if those symbols he had seen in those pretty regular spam-looking emails were really hidden messages, that of course begged the question as to who exactly was sending out hidden messages and as to who those messages could possibly be intended for.

Lavi's grin broke out in full force as he made it to the bus stop just in time to catch a ride home and he was barely able to restrain himself from opening the book up there and then when he had taken a seat in the back. _This is so bloody exciting!_

**- o0o -**

Silver-grey eyes snapped open, staring out into the darkness.

Finely tuned instincts flared up and he turned his head to the side where he lay on his back, staring at the illuminated display of his alarm clock. It read 02:42.

This was not the first time he had awoken unexpectedly in the middle of the night, seemingly for no reason, but this time around he knew that something was about to happen. After all, it wasn't paranoia if people were really out to get him. Slowly, he sat up and surveyed the area – his apartment – for a brief moment before swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, taking a deep slightly shuddering breath before grabbing a nearby hoodie and pulling it over his t-shirt before locating some pants – trousers, whatever – to go with it. Only then did he liberate an already loaded Walther PPK from beneath his pillow, along with a few rounds of ammunition. _Better be armed than sorry_, he thought as he pulled back the hammer and unsecured the gun with a slight click. _Rule number twenty-two._

The twenty rules previous to the rule in question could just go screw themselves over in Allen's opinion. Not because they were particularly stupid or anything; just obvious.

Thanks to the heads-up he had gotten from Tyki the day before, Allen had made at least some preparation in case of a worst case scenario. After all, as the classical saying went, preparation was the key to success and in Allen's case success was being able to live a bit longer, hopefully long enough to be able to dance on the graves of his enemies within the Family. Hence the reason as to why he had not only a gun and ammunition within an arm's reach from his bedside; his trainers were also close at hand, along with a mostly packed backpack, a nondescript jacket and a cap. After all, escaping his own apartment barefoot did not seem like a very tempting alternative, should the need to escape arise at a sudden notice.

Allen had just finished tying his shoelaces, silently with a bit of effort since it was so dark in there, when his hearing – sharper than usual because it was in the middle of the night – picked something up. It took a while before he was able to tune in to exactly what it was, but then he suddenly became certain as he picked up the sound of barely audible footsteps out in the hallway, soon followed by the slight thump of something fairly heavy being disposed of in front of a door, Allen's door, before the footsteps quickly disappeared back down the stairwell, echoing off into silence while at the same time drowning in the sound of something much more urgent.

Tick tick.

Allen immediately felt the blood in his veins freeze at the realisation of exactly what lay beyond that door. Only years of experience with situations of being in great peril stopped him from having one of his own special brand of panic attacks. Instead, he forced himself to calm down, putting the safety back on the gun before putting it away. Then he picked up the backpack and slung it over his shoulder, silently cursing the fact that he had no bulletproof vests conveniently lying around his apartment, before making his way up to the curtain-covered window. Stepping slightly to the side, he carefully peeked out through a slight gap, looking for the telltale sign of assassins – in other words, the red laser dot which would no doubt be pointing at his head if he revealed himself.

Luckily for Allen, it appeared as though the idiots who had obviously planted a bomb outside his door seemed quite certain that it would kill him off good and that there was no need for a sniper to finish him off, if the absence of red laser dots was to be believed. On the other hand, that could also mean that they were laying in wait for him anyway, seeking to lull him into a false sense of security before popping up to finish him off…

Allen shook his head slightly to clear his thoughts before pulling up his hood. Waiting around really wouldn't do him much good anyway, considering that there was a bomb nearby waiting to go off, so Allen calmly reached up to pull the curtains aside before reaching up to open the window.

Tick tick tock.

He was already in the air by the time the explosives went off.

The chilly night air rushed by him and he drew a sharp breath to compensate for the one which had been blown out of him when the shockwaves from the blast had hit him. His ears rang painfully when he cushioned his fall the best that he could when his fall was stopped by a parked van. His original objective had been another, but the blast had blown him slightly off course from the low roof he had been aiming for.

A quick assessment of his general condition told him that he had gotten away with a few cuts, bruises and likely a mildly sprained ankle. Hence, due to the seeming absence of heavy haemorrhage and fractures, Allen assumed that he would probably live. If he survived the night, that is. A red laser spot landed on his chest and Allen did what seemed the most sensible at the moment as he bolted and hid. He could do little more than wait for his attackers to show themselves and how many they were, but he already knew one thing for certain; they certainly didn't shy away from using fancy means in getting rid of him, indicating that they would likely fire shots at him even if he tried to hide inside a crowd, like those that would no doubt assemble in the neighbourhood soon enough.

Humans were curious creatures after all; far too curious for their own good. Then again, once the police arrived at the scene even his attackers would probably go for more subtle means; regardless of who they were and who they worked for, fancy operations in the open like this probably would not make the Earl very happy as it would obviously risk the crime syndicate he had spent so many years building.

Allen pulled his gun out again, eyes narrowing slightly.

Then again, there was also the possibility that the Earl – for whatever reason – had actually sanctioned the act of someone in the family launching an attack on him, to keep him on his toes or whatever. Either way, Allen was not amused in the least.

The sound of sirens brought him back into reality and he knew that he had to get going. Getting caught up in a police investigation really wasn't among his main priorities at the moment, but he still used the distraction to his advantage when he slipped deeper into the shadows, moving further away from the parts of the street that were illuminated by street lights. The fact that those after his life had yet to nail him with a shot to the head was a pretty good indication that they were not in possession of a pair of night vision goggles, which in turn gave Allen much better odds at surviving this whole ordeal, as long as he kept a low profile and did not give his position up. Still, that did raise a slight problem…

Adrenalin still rushing through his veins and pain temporarily forgotten, he slowly stood up and barely managed to suppress a hiss out of pain when part of his body weight came to rest on his injured limb. Readjusting his weight in the blink of an eye, his back came to rest against the brick wall behind him and he found himself raising his gaze skywards to glance at the heavy gray clouds that he knew rested there, although he could not see them very well from where he was. Hesitantly, he found himself reaching into his pocket and his fingers lingered on his cell phone there and then for a few seconds before he had eventually come to a decision. _I'll keep going._

And so he did.

**- o0o -**

_Remain on standby. _

_No interference. _

_Await further orders._

_- Adam_

Tyki kicked up an eyebrow in surprise before frowning down at his mobile display, eyes narrowing slightly. A direct order, delivered to him directly through a text message. Who would have expected? A rare occurrence, truly, and Tyki could pretty much guess what kind of special occasion had brought this about and he sighed heavily, texting a swift affirmative before slipping the phone back into his pocket and fishing up a package of cigarettes in its stead. Greedily, he inhaled the smoke, uncaring of the fact that he was still indoors, waiting for the nicotine to start working.

Allen certainly would not have approved, with his dislike of smoking and all, but then again the odds that Allen would come to visit his apartment anytime in the near future weren't very good. In fact, the odds that the white-haired teen would rather end up dead in this whole affair were rising by the minute, and Tyki was pretty damned sure that those retarded twins would start up a betting pool pretty soon on how long Allen's luck would last. His luck, or rather lack thereof, Tyki mused as he discarded the cigarette butt into an ashtray on his windowsill, staring out over the yard with a look of great disinterest.

It was important to keep up appearances after all, as Tyki really wouldn't put it past his dear family members to put someone on his tail in the hopes of finding Allen through him, clearly underestimating both of their intellects while they were at it; Tyki himself may not have been the sharpest tool in the box but on the other hand he had enough experience not to make such an amateurish mistake as trying to find someone who had clearly gone into hiding, and Allen on his end was way smarter than he was normally given credit for.

With a sigh, he reached out to close the curtains before crashing on the sofa, intending to take a brief nap before heading off to some pub to drink; a perfectly normal plan, considering the fact that all his missions had been put on ice due to the recent disturbances and the increased watchfulness by not only the police but the general public as well, courtesy of some bloody moron having pulled such a flashy move by nearly blowing up an entire floor of an apartment building in a failed attempt to assassinate a fifteen-year-old. Honestly, sometimes Tyki could not help but wonder how such idiots made it into the Family in the first place, but he wondered even more how they had managed to keep their positions even after showing such disgraceful displays of utter incompetence. Then again, the Earl was and had always been a bit weird in the head – exceedingly eccentric if nothing else – so there was a distinct possibility that their actions were simply tolerated – no, encouraged even – simply because they provided an element of suspense and many times also entertainment. Then again, if one reversed the whole scenario then Tyki supposed that this whole affair could be seen in an entirely different light…

The implication of such a scenario brought a thin smile to his face as he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling in silent contemplation as sleep continued to evade him. _Anjo…_ _This time… you'll have to manage on your own for a while…_

**- o0o -**

Lavi Bookman sighed heavily, his shoulders drooping, as he trudged home from yet another dreary day at the university after having been thoroughly chewed by the other members of his group for his lack of mental presence during their presentation. Not that such a thing weighed very heavily on the redhead's mind or anything; in truth, he had other loads to carry, such as his newly acquired foodstuff as he had dropped by a convenience store on the way and gee, those bags were surprisingly heavy. Heavy and filled with salty and sugary stuff and enough caffeine to keep him up the entire night, as was his intention since he didn't have classes the following day.

The mysterious code which had seemed so close to its solution just the day before proved to be way harder to crack than Lavi had anticipated, and unfortunately for the latter, trying to relate the similar Ogham writing to it all merely added to his general state of confusion. Then again, there was also that…

Lavi sighed again, wanting to tear his hair out or do some other dramatic gesture in order to show the world how frustrated this made him, but instead he merely opted for slouching a bit as he passed by yet another bus stop. Normally, he would have just taken the bus. Bags were bothersome to carry all the way when going home by foot, but then again in the light of recent events bringing his bags aboard might not be the wisest since a fair deal of paranoia had spread among the public following this recent terrorist bombing which had taken place the night before. Besides, walking helped him think.

As for the whole terrorist business, Lavi was not overly interested; sure, he was obsessed with organised crime and murder mysteries, but the whole issue of terrorism had never really appealed much to him. Perhaps it was due to its simplicity?

As far as the redhead himself was concerned, the culprits were either ultra religious and possibly a part of an international or just local terrorist group or just weird in the head in some other way. On second thought, they were all weird in the head, regardless of whether they decided to pull religious beliefs into it or not; evidently, those involved in organized crime got weird in the head eventually too, but Lavi really preferred dealing with the latter. Perhaps it was because fanatics were virtually impossible to reason with, or maybe just because religion itself was such a bore to him? The mere thought of it caused him to yawn.

**- o0o -**

Kanda Yu threw one last look of utter dismay at his surroundings before returning to look at the previously neatly stacked documents that were by then already in a disarray in front of him, all while the old man on the opposite side of the table – the same man who had supplied him with the documents – calmly ordered another cup of tea, levelling his eyes on nothing in particular while waiting, even though it was quite obvious that he was keeping an eye on everything that was going on within the small London café that had been their meeting place.

Kanda himself would have preferred to have visited a tea house instead, but meeting in a place such as this one seemed more tactical since the old man before him, Bookman, was apparently quite well-known in those areas, which in turn could have increased the risk of them being listened in on. Then again, as Bookman was apparently quite familiar with Japanese they had quite swiftly moved on to that once the fact had been established. Not that either one were very talkative or anything.

Besides, Japanese was not commonly understood by many members of the general public in these areas, or at least that's what Kanda himself had thought until a teenage girl dressed up as some kind of goth-loli – or whatever they were called; it wasn't like he cared or anything – swirled around, her eyes virtually sparkling before she opened her mouth and started spewing some sort of mangled Japanese back at him.

Only years of training and self-restraint prevented him from rising from his seat to strangle said individual to prevent her from further slaughtering his native tongue; that, and the sharp look he received from Bookman from across the table. It was a look Kanda knew the meaning of but was rarely subjected to himself: the "_Don't Cause a Scene, You Idiot_" look.

As such, in an attempt not to cause a scene, Kanda gritted his teeth and told the girl that no, he was absolutely not into _cosplay_ or any such debauchery, that he had never watched more than a couple of episodes of _anime_ in his entire life and did not own any _manga_ or games or whatever, that he had received a traditional upbringing and held no interest whatsoever in engaging in the wonders of popular culture and that he had come to this country with his grandfather only to retrieve his fiancé so that they could go back to Japan, get married and live a boring middle-class life together.

As intended, the goth-loli looked positively horrified at the prospect of his extremely normal ambition to become a regular salary man at an insurance company and soon following that she left the café, disillusioned by her first meeting with a bona fide Japanese guy. In silence, Kanda silently congratulated himself at possibly having discouraged yet another one of those annoying wannabes from ever visiting his home country before once again returning his attention to the documents, ploughing through the content with a deepening frown.

His English skills were perfectly satisfactory; he was merely a bit slow at reading it because those moronic Englishmen couldn't spell the words the way they were pronounced.

He looked up suddenly, his eyes flickering to the window to the side just as the first few raindrops started to fall, causing him to snort in response. _What a miserable country_, he thought. _Nothing but bad news, bad food, bad tea and bad weather…_

**- o0o -**

**- o0o -**

Lavi looked up just in time to be hit on the forehead by a raindrop which was soon followed by many more and he mentally cursed himself for not taking the bus. Then he sighed again, tightening his grip on the plastic bags again as he continued on his way; it was only about one and a half block until he was home anyway, so jumping on a bus then would only have been a waste of money since he would probably get wet anyway before reaching his intended destination. Nevertheless, the thought of spending even a minute more than necessary out in the cold rain did not sound very appealing to him, so instead he opted for a shortcut and jogged into one of the side alleys that he knew like the back of his hand. Already in a slightly better mood, Lavi picked up his pace slightly but just as he passed by this big dumpster there was something that just made him stop dead in his tracks.

There seemed to be some sort of red spots on the pavement and he stared at them for a moment, in wonder almost, all while the rain began erasing them from existence. Even so, they had looked almost fresh…

He looked up, or down rather, and only then really took note of the slumped figure leaning its back against one of the dumpster's sides. _White… hair?_

For a moment, Lavi just stood there staring, but he swiftly found himself. Putting down the plastic bags onto the ground, he carefully crept forward, putting a hand out towards the figure; his life with Bookman had taught him to respect and be helpful towards the elderly – since they were quite a fearsome bunch, regardless of their often quite poor physical condition – so he felt as though he needed to make sure the old man was still alive before moving on. Alternatively, if said old man proved to be some sort of overdosed drug addict, Lavi planned on calling an ambulance or something. Maybe.

Anyways, finding out the guy's condition came first, so Lavi started out with tapping the other's shoulder, receiving no response. He then leaned forward, pressing his fingers onto the other's neck to feel for a pulse. From his new position, and the slight tilt of the other's head, Lavi was now made aware of the fact that the old guy before him did not seem to be very old at all. In fact, he looked far more like a teenager than a retiree.

From his new angle, Lavi could also tell that the other was still breathing, a bit shallowly maybe, but it was still an overall positive thing in Lavi's world because then he wouldn't have to report another corpse to the authorities and possibly get involved into something troublesome again – aka being suspected of murder, because that had actually happened at one point.

Lavi's gaze strayed lower, his eye widening slightly at what he saw and his body automatically responding by pulling out his cell phone. _Visible gunshot wound with an entrance point in the left shoulder. _

He had just about finished entering the triple nine when a hand shot out and grabbed onto his hand. Lavi startled, eyes darting back in the direction of the white-haired teen who was by then suddenly looking at him with a pair of cold narrowed silver-grey eyes. "Don't… call," the silver-eyed teen hissed, his grip hardening onto Lavi's hand.

Cold sweat covered the other's face and he was almost trembling now that he was back into wakefulness; Lavi absentmindedly wondered if the other was going into shock. The other's eyes looked strangely glassy, but they were still looking at him without a doubt.

"I won't call," Lavi finally said, closing down the phone and slipping it back into his pocket all while watching in fascination how the other relaxed some. "Then again, you do look like you could need a pizza, don't you think?"

The other stared incredulously at him for a moment, and even more so when Lavi held out his hand to pull him up from the ground.

Lavi's day just got a whole lot more interesting.

**- o0o -**


	4. Reaching a Dead End

**- o0o -**

**Reaching a Dead End**

**- o0o -**

An unfamiliar ceiling met him, just as the migraine of a century came crashing down on him. He tried to sit up, only to realize it was a very bad idea as a sharp pain shot through him, focused around his shoulder. Black spots danced before his visions and he nearly sunk back into unconsciousness, but managed to will the darkness away, at least temporarily. He slumped forward where he sat, thoroughly nauseous, trying to assess the situation but not really coming up with anything which wasn't bloody obvious to anyone with a pair of functioning eyes.

He felt around for his gun, not finding it. Okay, he had expected as much. Seeing the positive thing in the situation, Allen was at least able to say that even though his gun had likely been taken from him at some point, at least he was not drugged up and handcuffed to a chair or anything, or a bed for that matter. Instead, he had been deposited on a sofa in a room full of countless books and scattered papers, and he had been propped up with numerous pillows and covered with a blanket. His gunshot wound had been treated; it had been done quite amateurishly, but Allen supposed it was still better than nothing since he had not bled to death during the time he was unconscious.

Speaking of which…

He lifted the blanket slightly, throwing it aside as he swung his legs over the edge of the sofa. Another wave of pain flooded his senses, forcing him to be still for few moments as it faded to slightly more tolerable levels. Apparently, someone had changed his clothes as well. Allen guessed it wasn't all that surprising since he had probably still been quite wet from the rain when he had been brought in. The clothes hung loosely around his frame, surely at least two sizes too big for him, when he stood up, swaying a bit until he managed to find some sort of balance. He stood, surveying the room with a great deal of interest, taking particular interest in the papers which lay scattered on floors and desks and other pieces of furniture alike. Unable to help his growing curiosity, he snatched a paper from a nearby chest of drawers, glancing at what was written on it. Mysterious and utterly incomprehensible equations met his eye, and he discarded it quickly, experiencing another onslaught of dizziness. _Okay… where the fuck am I?_

Against better judgment, he picked up another piece of paper. His eyes grew wide at the sight of the symbols, the accursed code which the Family used for its secret communication. It took only moments for his brain to have converted it back to normal letters, and only seconds for the message to seemingly engrave itself onto his retina. _Oh… crap._

Alright, panic. Oh wait, don't panic, don't panic, don't panic, don't panic…

He took a deep breath, attempting to calm himself. Then he shuddered, sinking to the floor. His wounded shoulder protested a bit, but he paid it little heed as black dots were once again taking over his vision, accompanied by a dull buzzing sound which resonated within his aching head. _Okay… I am so officially screwed._

Then his mind shut down again, and all was dark and quiet.

**- o0o -**

His consciousness returned slowly, and the world still swam when he opened his eyes. Sluggishly, he realized that he was back on the sofa, covered in blankets, and that there was someone else in the room, moving about. A young male, if Allen's ears could be trusted. "So…" a voice suddenly intruded from above, when a red-haired bandana-and-eye-patch-wearing green-eyed freak leaned over the backrest of the couch, entering his line of vision. "Pizza's still good, right?"

Allen just shot him a look of utter incomprehension.

**- o0o -**

About half an hour later, Allen was far more convinced than ever that he was actually lying dead in a ditch somewhere and that this was the so called 'Afterlife' which he had heard so much about. It was either the afterlife or his personal Hell, seeing that he'd probably be rejected at Heaven's Gate with his track record. Somewhat absentmindedly, Allen wondered whether the redhead who sat at his opposite, ordering pizza over the phone, was the Devil, or at least some sort of demonic minion in said person's army. "Would you like pineapple or mushrooms on yours?" said red-haired devil asked, sending him a questioning glance.

"_With or without poison on top?"_ Allen's paranoia added.

He shook his head, trying to clear his mind.

"Chicken or ham?"

His lips moved on their own accord, formulating an answer.

**- o0o -**

"Need any more painkillers?"

Allen looked up somewhat sluggishly, his eyes landing on the form of his redheaded saviour (?) as the young man sat with his back turned to him, typing energetically on a laptop. Not receiving an answer, the other spun around in his office chair, levelling him with an evaluating look. "Need any more painkillers?" he then repeated, tilting his head to the side in question.

"Got any morphine?" Allen finally asked, earning himself a laugh in return.

"No morphine, sorry," the other smiled back at him. "But I do think I have some Novocain lying around here somewhere… Want me to find it?"

_Got any chloroform so that I can knock you out and escape?_

"Oh right," the redhead said after having spun around again. "I still haven't gotten your name…"

_Oh really? I was convinced you had gone through my pockets when you stripped me, explaining the absence of my gun along with my other valuables. I should have had a wallet on me. Did you open it? My student ID should still be in there…_

The redhead spun around again, staring up into the ceiling, seemingly contemplating something. Then his single visible eye widened somewhat, and he snapped his fingers, seemingly struck by a sudden realization. "Oh, that's right!" the redheaded idiot (?) then exclaimed, slapping his forehead. "I forgot to introduce myself!"

_No shit, Sherlock._

Allen startled, wincing in pain as he did so when the redhead was suddenly upon him again, getting up close and personal, seemingly completely ignorant of the fact that he was invading Allen's little personal bubble. Feeling extremely cornered and panicking slightly because of it, Allen found himself staring into the extremely cheerful and terrifyingly friendly visage of his supposed saviour. "I'm Lavi," the redhead said, leaning even closer. "Let's get along, eh?"

It was about then that Allen's mind suddenly went blank, and without any common sense or rationality to interfere, his internal panic virtually exploded. His instincts took command, and he leapt into action immediately. His hand shot out, ready to strike at the other's vitals, but it was caught before reaching its target. His eyes widened in shock. "Too slow," the redhead responded, applying more pressure to his wrist.

Everything was spinning again. He tried to break free, only to be dragged even closer. Suddenly, he had sunk to the floor, held firmly in someone's embrace. There was a hand on his head, stroking his hair. "Calm down," a voice said, firmly. "Breathe… breathe calmly. Take it slowly… You're hyperventilating."

_Again… No shit, Sherlock._

His eyesight was still blurry, but it was starting to clear up. Perhaps part of the blurriness could be attributed to the fact that tears had at some point welled up in his eyes, disposing of what little dignity he might still have had left. _I feel kind of pathetic today._

"Oh shit," the redhead – Lavi – spat out, gingerly scooping him up from the floor as though he did not weigh a thing, placing him back onto the sofa, hovering over him with a deeply concerned look on his face. "Looks like I'm gonna have to stitch you up again."

So one of his stitches had burst? Then it was really no wonder he felt this warm liquid sensation coming from the area around his shoulder. _I'm so dead. I'm so dead this isn't even funny anymore._

**- o0o -**

When he came to a third time, there were voices all around him. His eyelids felt like they had been weighed down by lead, so opening his eyes was out of the question. Hell, judging from the numbness he felt – or rather, the things he didn't feel – he very much doubted he could even lift a finger in his state.

There was a voice which was almost directly above him, muttering words he could not catch. It sounded like a foreign language, and it sounded remarkably much like cursing.

The heaviness on his eyelids lifted a bit, and he briefly caught sight of the scowling man of Asian origin who sat at his bedside, cleaning his hands. Chinese? No. Japanese? Did it matter?

Eyes, dark blue and not black as he had expected, levelled on him for a few moment, narrowing. Then the other snorted, turning away to address someone else.

The world went back out of focus again and Allen found himself surrendering to whatever drugs had been pumped into his system. He was too tired to think, too tired to fear or to even attempt to struggle; it was no use, not with all the blood he had lost. He had no idea where he was and with whom, at least not beyond the fact that his company included an insane redhead and a seemingly pissed off Asian. At least he wasn't dead yet, or back in the Family's clutches as far as he could tell; there had been no insane redheads or pissed off Asians enrolled in the family as far as he had been informed, and if there had then his surroundings would probably have been of a different kind altogether. Allen knew what an interrogation cell looked like, and this just wasn't one. That in itself was a relief, but even so, he was cornered. He had reached a dead end and there was no way out other than to overcome the spectacles in his way in order to move forward.

That's right, he needed to move forward. Mana had told him so before, repeated it over and over again, but at some point it had just seemed to slip his mind. He needed to move forward, to keep on moving, to keep from getting caught… But he had gotten caught and he had forgotten those words imprinted in him, forgotten to move on; he had stood still for too long and as a result he had nearly gotten himself killed. Most members of the Family had not accepted him as a potential heir to the Earl and still held a grudge after what the Fourteenth had tried to do. It did not matter that the man himself had been dead and buried for years; it had never mattered, because the people in the Family did not forget and they did not forgive. That was the truth and it was one he needed to accept; he had reached a dead end in his life and he needed a way out…

**- o0o -**

Once again, he drifted back into awareness. His eyes fluttered open and almost immediately, they fell on the needle which had been inserted into his arm, hooking him up to some sort of drip. Instincts flaring up, he immediately reached out to rip it out his arm, but before he was able to his hand was caught and he found himself face to face with the insane redhead from earlier. "Whoa," the redhead said, looking at him with surprise. "Are you alright?"

"Needle," Allen gasped, screwing his eyes shut. "Get it out."

No really, he honestly could not stand needles; perhaps it was due to some traumatic experience in his youth, but he honestly could not stand needles. When vulnerable, those thin pieces of metal with sharp edges utterly terrified him, while in a normal state they merely made him feel a bit queasy. This time around, seeing that he had one of those wretched little things buried deep into his arm, they sent him into the primary stages of a full-blown panic. "Get it out," he repeated, trying to keep his voice level and his breathing back under control. "Do it."

Vaguely, he could pick up on the panic blooming up in the other person in the room. "Alright, alright," the redhead said with seemingly forced calm. Hands seized his arm, forcing it down flat onto the sofa. "I'll pull it out, okay? So just calm down… chill out…"

Painstakingly, Allen could feel the needle being retracted; it was over in a second but it felt like an eternity. He opened his eyes just in time to see the redhead discarding the needle and hanging it up onto the drip before reaching for a package of band aids. Allen visibly relaxed a bit but still kept a wary eye on both the needle and the one who had been responsible for retracting it; the redhead seemingly noticed and attempted to smile reassuringly at him when applying the band aid, failing miserably. Even so, the redhead looked mildly encouraged by the fact that Allen had seemingly calmed down and had yet to do anything other than stare at him, which was quite an accomplishment considering what had happened the last time around. "So…" the redhead continued, testing his luck. "How are you feeling?"

Allen tilted his head to the side, contemplating his answer for a second. Then he looked back towards the redhead, intent on delivering his answer. "Like shit, obviously," he shot back, earning himself a laugh. He paused briefly, surveying the area once more now that he deemed himself to be reasonably coherent. "But I'm not dead at least, so I suppose it's an improvement."

The redhead let out an amused snort, grinning widely. "I'm glad," the redhead – Lavi, was it? – said, reaching out to him now, putting a hand to his forehead. Allen let him. "Because the old man is going to kill me now that I unhooked you from the IV-drip, seeing that he explicitly told me not to, but that's okay because he threatens to kill me all the time…" he continued, pausing slightly and frowning. "I think your temperature has risen again."

For some inexplicable reason, Allen snorted at this. "You're worried about my temperature when I have a gunshot wound in my left shoulder?" he asked, smiling wryly. "You have strange priorities."

"Well…" Lavi said, continuing to smile disturbingly brightly at him. "I did panic about that earlier on, after my shoddy needlework and all, but the guy the old man brought here seemed to know what he was doing so…"

Allen looked up. "The Asian guy?"

"Japanese," Lavi responded, shrugging mildly. "Grumpy, but skilled. One of the old geezer's business associates no doubt. I think his name was… Kan Dayu or something."

It took a lot of self-restraint on Allen's part to not burst out laughing. Even so, the word business associates had trigged something within him and he was immediately reminded of something which had been taken from him. "So…" he said, keeping his voice calm. "Where's my stuff?"

Lavi blinked, seemingly surprised by his inquiry. Then he smiled knowingly. "You mean the gun?" he said, withdrawing slightly as though to ensure that the white-haired teen would not try anything stupid.

Letting out a longsuffering sigh, Allen screwed his eyes back shut for a second before opening them, praying for patience. "My stuff, gun included," he said, forcing himself to remain calm. "Or excluded; I don't care as long as you return the rest of them."

The redhead raised an eyebrow in response. "Why?"

Allen opened his eyes, looking up at him. "How long have I been here?"

"Two days," the redhead responded, eyeing him with keen interest. "How so?"

He felt ill all of a sudden. Two days? Two days. Oh God…

"Please…" he found himself saying. "Get my stuff and show me the way out… Don't question me, just do it."

Lavi looked at him, frowning. "You think they've tracked you down?" he then said. "The guys who shot you…"

Allen sent a glare in his direction, but it lacked something. His eyes trailed down onto the floor, searching for the paper he had dropped earlier. He didn't find it. "What are you looking for?" he heard Lavi asking and realized he had to come to a decision.

Allen looked up at the redhead where he stood, eyeing him warily. "There was a paper," he began. "A paper covered in symbols…"

"No way, no bloody way," the other's single visible green eye widened noticeably and the redhead turned around, snatching the paper and presenting it before him, eyeing him with a sense of badly concealed excitement. "What does it say? What does it say?"

Taking the paper in his hand, Allen threw another glance down at it, finding the same message there as he had upon picking it up earlier. _'Find the Fourteenth and bring him in, dead or alive.'_

"I think I'm going to be sick," Allen announced, pressing a hand to his mouth.

**- o0o -**


	5. Driven Into A Corner

_Admittedly, it's been forever since the last time I updated this, and I did a few edits along the way. This is the new chapter five, otherwise known as the chapter which went… a bit overboard in certain aspects. In regards to the continuation, I am a bit conflicted to say the least, seeing that I don't really want to rush things along to make this thing even more nonsensical than it already is. Thus, __I leave myself open for suggestions on what to make of this__ – to continue, discontinue, rework or delete it. _

_Cheers._

**- o0o -**

**Driven Into A Corner**

**- o0o -**

He felt nauseous, like he was going to be sick over and over. Then again, he had already ridded himself of what little had remained in his stomach, so there really wasn't much left to throw up. Hence, he was no longer slumped over a toilet seat and had instead relocated into a half-seated position on the tiled floor of the bathroom he had locked himself into, all while he – keeping his eyes firmly shut – forced himself to remain calm, even in a situation as dire as the one he had at hand.

He was tired – dizzy even – but he forced himself to remain awake and alert, knowing well that he had already let his guard down far too many times already, wittingly or unwittingly. Then again, he had been shot, and as such, he had presumably lost quite a bit of blood, something which would no doubt have inhibited his thought process – in other words, he had with all due likelihood been far too out of it initially to handle the situation properly.

That bandana-and-eye-patch-wearing green-eyed redheaded freak – Lavi, or whatever the guy had called himself – had claimed that he had been there and out for two days, an account which seemed fairly credible. Then again, regardless of whether it was true or not, Allen found himself in a civilian household somewhere in London, suffering the aftermath of an acquired gunshot wound in his shoulder, virtually stranded with absolutely nowhere and no one to go to now that the Family had likely turned on him.

Two days – possibly even two and a half if he counted the night he had been forced out on the run – had supposedly passed. If anything, it was a sheer miracle in itself that the Family hadn't either caught or killed him yet, but then again, it was entirely possible that a few of them – Tyki Mikk included – were not putting much effort into obliging to the Earl's recently issued command to have him brought in. Contrary to popular belief, quite a few of the members of the Family did appreciate leading a fairly calm lifestyle of far more discreet criminal activities – to the extent of Allen's knowledge, at any rate – and as such, said Family members were highly unlikely to go out of their way to pursue him, leaving that particular activity to the far more motivated and destructive extremists. Thus, he highly doubted that he would find himself up against the entire Noah Family, but that still left the issue that he had – in essence – been thrown out to the wolves and been completely cut off from potential allies. Then again, Allen supposed he had actually contributed a whole lot to the latter, seeing that he had disposed of his cell phone soon after he had been shot, trying to minimise the possibility of him being tracked.

Still, the realisation of just how much time had passed since his narrow escape had sent him headlong into a state of panic, a state from which he had only recently recovered, even though it had taken the sacrifice of the contents of his stomach to accomplish such a feat. As things turned out, actually vomiting and dry-heaving for a bit worked wonders in terms of easing his mood, mostly because it exhausted him to such an extent that he no longer had the energy to panic if he wanted to conserve enough energy to remain conscious and reasonably coherent. Thus, he found himself in a seated position on a tiled floor, leaning his forehead against his pulled-up knees, trying to breathe calmly. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. He leant his head back. Breathe out…

Silver-grey eyes cracked open at the sound of soft knocking on the door. "Are you okay in there?" a familiar voice inquired.

He screwed his eyes shut once more as the knocking continued, growing louder in response to his lack of an answer to the other's inquiry. He frowned mildly at the other's seeming persistence, cursing him fluently in five different languages under his breath. To his surprise, the persistent knocking immediately ceased. Silence followed it, and was retained for several seconds before the voice on the other side of the door spoke up once more, addressing him in one of said languages. "Ehm… _etto, daijoubu desuka_?"

His eyes cracked back open, surveying the door with something akin to distaste. "I need my life back…"

His statement, delivered in a slightly hoarse murmur, was met by silence. Then, the voice followed, sounding rather hesitant. "_Etto ne_… Allen? _Doa wo akete… kudasai_?"

Allen?

Well, that obviously meant that the redheaded bandana-and-eye-patch-wearing green-eyed freak otherwise known as Lavi had located his student ID amongst the stuff that had been taken from him back when he was in a general state of unawareness. Okay, not so good, because that meant he would soon have at least three individuals he would have to get rid of for having discovered his identity, not to mention the fact that he was – with all due likelihood – also at the mercy of said individuals, seeing that they – now that they probably all knew enough about him to match a name to a face and said identity to a highly illegal firearm which had previously been in his possession – could alert the authorities at any minute and efficiently ensure that he would be found and killed by the Family before sundown. Truly, it was a miserable situation, especially so if one took the redhead into consideration.

"Hey, Allen… Come on… you seem to have calmed down now, so please come out…"

"…I promise I won't do anything weird; I just want to talk…"

Yeah, talk. They all wanted to talk, with or without pointing a gun at your temple or a taser to the back of your neck. Yeah, they all wanted to 'talk' – talk, interrogate… in the end there was little difference to it. Talk, talk, talk. Spill all your secrets – spill your guts, or we'll do so literally. Blah, blah, blah…

He had always thought them to be quite funny – interrogations, that is. The less you talked, the nastier methods were utilised to make you talk, and the more you talked, the less pain was inflicted on you, up until the moment you had talked too much and ran out of anything useful to say… well, go figure.

More knocking. "Hey, Allen… there's still some pizza in the fridge if you want some…"

Bribes? Was this guy seriously resorting to bribes – and food of all things? Okay, this guy seriously needed some sort of reality check. Hadn't he like… noticed that he had spent a great deal of time locked inside the bathroom, ridding himself of what little had still remained in his stomach?

"Hey, Alleeeeeen… Talk to me…"

Again, with that thing. Talk, talk, talk. Spill all your secrets – spill your guts, or we'll do so literally. Blah, blah, blah… – "_Moyashi_! Open the fucking door before I break it down!" – blah?

Bean… sprout?

Silver-grey eyes widened a fraction. _What the…Hell?_

Then, he was struck by a sense of realisation. Oh right, the angry Asian – or rather the allegedly grumpy but skilled business associate of some old geezer – aka the very guy who had allegedly stitched him up.

Allen sat up a bit straighter as another sharp knock echoed in the small room, cursing inwardly. _God damn it, what's up with all these situations I keep getting myself into?!_

**- o0o -**

Truly, it appeared as though God – if said divine entity did actually exist – truly hated him and did so rather passionately, seeing that he only minutes later found himself sitting on a chair in the middle of some room, surrounded by three individuals, two of whom were watching him from chairs of their own while a third kept prodding at his injury, muttering darkly. It was a painful fact that he did feel awfully vulnerable to be in such a situation, even though he was by no means tied to the chair or otherwise threatened by any of the individuals in the room, and that alone should have been taken as a positive sign.

Then again… upon closer visual inspection, he could make out that the old man – presumably the old geezer mentioned by the redheaded freak – probably carried something on him, even though it did not seem like a handgun. The redhead himself was unarmed and seemingly laidback, still grinning disarmingly at him as though said redhead had not recently proved himself capable of stopping an attempt to strike at his vitals, and lastly, there was – of course – the sour-looking Asian in the room who was still busying himself dealing with the gunshot wound.

Silence. They were waiting for him to crack, weren't they? Obviously, he would hate to disappoint, but then again, he doubted he would be getting any answers to just what the Hell was going on before he agreed to part with some of his own…

"Why am I here?" he finally asked, warily eyeing his surroundings.

The sour-looking Asian paused momentarily, dark eyes levelling him with a short glare before returning to overseeing the task of redressing his wound – the guy looked grumpy as Hell, but Allen had to admit that he had some serious skills, going about the task at hand with the detachment of one very much acclimatised to violence and very much accustomed to dressing related wounds. "…You're here because some idiot found you bleeding out behind a dumpster in some dark alleyway," the other responded, tightening the bandages suddenly as if to emphasise his point, all while Allen himself hissed slightly, having declined local anaesthesia.

"Ouch," he found himself murmuring as the other finally withdrew.

"If it had been a bit more to the left, it would've ruptured a major artery," the other responded flatly.

In other words, if Allen hadn't managed to dodge it in time, he would have bled out within minutes. Huh, it seemed as though luck might actually have been on his side for once. "Figures."

"However…"

He looked up slightly, watching the other watch him rather dispassionately. "From the angle, I doubt they were aiming for your shoulder…"

Silver-grey eyes narrowed slightly. _No shit, Sherlock._

"To be frank," the other explained, taking a seat in the only unoccupied chair in the vicinity. "I honestly couldn't care any less in regards to who's after you and why… but, seeing that I happened to turn up to save your sorry ass, you'd better prove useful."

…_I'd better prove useful?_

A white eyebrow was kicked up in mystification, but judging from the noises indicating surprise from the peanut gallery, the other's statement came as just as much of a surprise to them as it was to him. Then again, in this particular case, 'them' would serve to indicate the redhead, seeing that the old man in the room only let out a small huff, as though he had been expecting this sort of development all along and especially so when the aforementioned Asian suddenly procured a photograph seemingly out of thin air and thrust it in his direction.

Allen caught the item in question by pure reflex – even if it did occur to him that he probably shouldn't have – and flipped it over. The image of a woman met him, with a slightly sheepish smile gracing her features all while she flashed a victory sign at the camera, looking mildly embarrassed with it all. She was beautiful in her long dress and waist-length coat – there was little point in denying that – her long hair in a ponytail held together by a piece of cloth. She _was_ beautiful – _really_ – but there was something distinctly saddening about her, even though he really could not tell why. He looked up, only then really paying attention to the sudden increase in the attention which was directed towards him. "What?"

The Japanese guy – Kanda Yu or something to the like – continued watching him darkly. "That woman."

He tilted his head to the side in question. "Yes?"

The stare only intensified. "Can you identify her?"

He looked back down at the photograph, studying it with a greater degree of interest. Then he finally looked up, meeting the eyes that were watching him so intently. "…Alma Karma."

Immediately, the stare darkened to an outright glare and a dangerous one at that, and even the other occupants of the room seemed mildly taken aback.

"What?" he eventually snapped, having grown tired of being the focus of all those rather accusing stares. "That's what it says on her name tag."

Initially, looks of utter incomprehension met his eye. Then, realisation dawned upon the lot and a familiar redheaded freak sprung forth, snatching the photograph from him within the blink of an eye – _honestly, what is it with this freak and his ridiculously quick reflexes?_ – studying it with a great deal of interest before finally looking up, an almost gobsmacked expression gracing his features. "…You're right."

Oh, what the…? This was getting utterly ridiculous! First, he had to flee head over heels to escape some crazy relatives of his. Then, he had to suffer the company of some redheaded weirdo who had apparently taken him in, and now he found himself in some utterly ridiculous interrogation-like situation where people were suddenly interrogating him about whether or not he could identify some random lady in a picture, not even touching upon the subject that he had been carrying an unregistered firearm on him and whatnot. Really, what on earth could they possibly be getting at? If they were seriously going to try to see to that he was jailed, he sure as Hell wanted to be imprisoned for something he was actually responsible for rather than for the sake of abducting or killing some stranger he had never seen before in his life, or whatever despicable act these people could possibly intend to accuse him for.

"Look…" he finally said, keeping his voice perfectly level. "Whoever she is, I'm pretty sure I've never seen her before."

"She went missing in the area more than a week ago," the Japanese guy immediately snapped back at him.

Allen gave a noticeable twitch. "So?" he returned, equally snappish. "This is London, mate, the place where Big Brother sees you almost everywhere you go as soon as you step outside the door. If this girl really has gone missing, then go file a missing person's report and have the police do the rest for you. Why are you asking _me_?"

That was a really good question actually. Why the Hell was he being interrogated with the whereabouts of some chick he had never seen before in his life when he could be interrogated for so much else?

Then again, with the city's surveillance system, it was even more peculiar that he hadn't been found yet. Evidently, the Family – Wisely in particular – had a tendency to mess around with said system, hacking into it and providing interference whenever there was a hit going down, ensuring the continued anonymity of the members involved. After all, it wasn't like the Noah had managed to operate virtually unknown and unseen for such a long time without the use of such underhanded means – to operate in a well-monitored zone like London for extended periods of time, providing such interference was only natural. With a start, he realised that it had become so natural that he himself hadn't even thought much about it, naturally having assumed that the systems had been brought down whenever there was a major upsurge in the Family activity. They – some of them, at any rate – had planted a bomb outside his apartment for goodness sake; if they hadn't ensured that the surveillance in that particular area hadn't been brought down, they would no doubt have been caught on at least some amount of surveillance footage. Somehow, he doubted they were that stupid, but that would mean…

There was a snort. He looked up.

"Curiously enough," the Japanese guy snapped, having snatched the photograph back at some point. "My sources tell me that up to a third of all CCTV cameras almost simultaneously malfunctioned upon the time of her exiting the Underground, which is – curiously enough – the nearly exact thing which occurred the night before the idiot found you, a blackout which continued until yesterday, when all the systems suddenly went back online again."

Allen blinked, his brain catching onto and meticulously cataloguing this new piece of information, adding it to the others. "The network… had a blackout?"

Well, that certainly confirmed his theory regarding his own situation, but it still left a whole lot of questions to figure out. Admittedly, the Family would probably have liked to get the whole deal with him finished with minimal interference from the proper authorities, but that in itself shouldn't have included them providing interference in anything other than covering up their own involvement in the matter. However, in that they had kept the interference up for days, they had by all means obstructed their own search operation. But _why_?

Taking this new piece of information into consideration, it would only be fair for him to assume that he was missing out on something; that there was a hidden variable somewhere which had gone past his notice, something which had either been deliberately kept from him or otherwise been overlooked, but what could it be?

Okay, so they had seemingly made an attempt on his life by blowing up his apartment. Still, there was the fact that he had been warned about it – technically speaking – with Tyki giving him a heads-up that something was about to go down. Without any disrespect to the guy in question, to the best of Allen's knowledge, Tyki Mikk was not the most perceptive person in the world. If the Family – in other words, the Earl – had really wanted to ensure his imminent demise, the man would probably have seen to the matter during a Family gathering rather than sending someone else to deal with the matter, especially considering the trouble the man allegedly went through to see him brought into the Family in the first place. Then again, it obviously wouldn't do to disregard the fact that the man in question was a whimsical madman who murdered his own brothers…

Allen shook his head tiredly, deciding to ponder such a matter at a later date, once he had managed to figure out just what the Hell was going on with people randomly deciding to interrogate him about the whereabouts of random missing women. Then again…

"Uh… Yu?"

He looked up, only then really taking note of that the crazy redhead – that Lavi guy – had at some point exited the room and only then really stuck his head back into it, addressing the raven-haired Asian who had probably spent the last few minutes or so glaring at him.

"What?" said individual snarled, shifting his attention towards the redhead – who was wearing a rather odd look of something akin to disbelief on his face – who in turn procured a remote, pressing a button to turn up the volume.

"The TV," was all that Lavi offered as an explanation before once again disappearing out of sight. "You've both got to see this…"

Allen kicked up an eyebrow in mystification as the glaring individual immediately got up and left the room, presumably to find out just what had caused such an emotion to emerge in the aforementioned dubiously sane redhead. With an odd feeling of foreboding, he got up to follow rather than to sneak out now that everyone seemed distracted with this new matter at hand, catching the end of a report of some gruesome murder before a disturbingly familiar face popped onto the screen. The blood drained from his head in what seemed like an instant, and he imagined the colour had drained from his face just as fast.

"Allen, you okay?"

That… was an awfully stupid question.

Allen felt his legs go weak and his hand shot out to seek support from the doorframe, his mind reeling. _I'm so dead._

To think that the Earl would pull such a stunt on him… perhaps the old man had actually cracked after all? _I'm __**so**__ dead._

_I'm so __**dead**__._

"…_There's still no sign of the missing heir of Ark Enterprises. Fifteen-year-old Allen Walker disappeared in London on the night to the 14__th__, and evidence found in his apartment strongly indicates that he did not leave it by his own free will…"_

The television displayed some brief footage from his wrecked apartment before shifting to yet another familiar face of an unusually sombre-looking Earl, presumably at some press conference, all while the reporter continued on her voiceover.

"…_A search is currently underway, but the sitting director Adam Walker has stated that any tips leading to his nephew being found will be rewarded…"_

He could feel his legs folding beneath him, sending him crumbling to the floor into a heap, tearing his disbelieving eyes from the screen and fixating them onto the floor all while quietly admitting a glaring truth to himself. "I'm so fucking dead."

"_This is Lulu Bell, reporting in for BBC News."_

Of all things they could possibly have thrown at him, why did it have to be _that_?

Once more, he found himself at the very centre of attention, the focus of far too many eyes.

"Dude…" Lavi finally said, pointing towards the screen with the remote all while looking at him with something akin to disbelief. "_Ark Enterprises_?"

_Ark Enterprises_, otherwise known as the surprisingly successful side project of the Fourteenth. It had started out as an almost fully legal project, dealing mainly with creating computer software and coding and decoding information. Neah Walker – as the slightly homicidal musical genius he was – was, as mentioned, a bloody _genius_ and thus required quite a bit of intellectual stimulation, stimulation which he found in dabbling with programming and creating computer software, intricate symbols and whatnot. During this time, he had allegedly created the code – which was nowadays used for communication between highly ranked Family members – and shared it with Mana, developing a sort of secret language in the process, one which Allen himself had more or less unwittingly made the Earl privy to.

_Ark Enterprises_, originally the surprisingly successful side project of the Fourteenth, which was nowadays still a very successful side project, though to the Earl once Neah had failed in his attempt to take over the other 'family business' and been executed as a result.

_Ark Enterprises_, nowadays the small but widely successful company working as the legal front to a criminal empire set on world domination and whatnot.

_Ark Enterprises_. The utterly accursed _Ark Enterprises_.

Of all things they could possibly have done to him, why did it have to be _that_?

What could they possibly attempt to get at by bringing him out in the public eye? Were they honestly too bloody lazy to track him down by themselves? Were they really going to have the public find him for them so that they could stage another bloody sniping incident out in the open? Just what the Hell were they planning?

Hands landed on top of his shoulders and his head snapped up in attention, bringing him face to face with an annoyingly familiar and sheepishly smiling redhead. "Does this mean I'm accidentally a kidnapper now?"

He stared at the individual in question with clear disbelief. No really, he was stunned speechless, which was a fairly rare occurrence overall. Then, his brain finally caught up to the situation, and he said the very first thing which came to mind, his face deadpan. "Are you fucking crazy?"

There was a snort from nearby. "Did you really need to ask?"

**- o0o -**


End file.
